Glacial melt
by planet p
Summary: AU; Victoria wants revenge on Bella for James’s death. Victoria/Charlie, kind of.


**Glacial m****elt** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _Twilight_ or any of its characters.

**Author'****s Notes** Set after the film, _Twilight_. I've never read the books. Kind of lame.

* * *

When it happened, it happened like Spring. Like the glacier inside her, the glacier she'd become – she saw the world through, the edges misted by glassy ice – had started to melt, and flow away from her. Like something escaping her.

She'd meant to do it to hurt Bella. Because Bella had taken away something – someone – very important to her, possibly the most important thing in the world to her, she sometimes thought, when she cried and cried. Sometimes she cried so much, and she hated it, but she couldn't stop it.

She'd met Charlie in the forest. It had been unexpected. A human in the forest. But then she'd realised who he was, and had decided, instead of fleeing, to approach him. At first, she'd thought she would kill him where he stood, then she decided that she could actually have some fun with Bella beforehand if she played her cards right. Make her feel what she'd felt when she'd tricked James into walking into his own funeral.

Strange, she thought, as she walked back with Bella's father, back toward the civilisation of Forks, that he was so gullible, yet he was a police officer. She told him that she'd been looking at mushrooms, and he'd believed her, then he'd offered her his jacket – as though she was cold, as though she could feel anything anymore – but she took the item offered; polite was a heck of a better in than anything she'd so far expected when she'd contemplated her revenge against Isabella Swan.

At the house, he called her a taxi, and they waited inside for it to arrive. He even made her a tea, something herbal, though she left it untouched other than that she wrapped her hands around the outside of the glass, and wondered how she could not feel the heat.

Nothing was any good anymore after she'd lost James, she realised, and was abruptly startled from her thoughts by a hand at her upper arm, though she did not show it, and looked up and around to see Charlie standing beside her, telling her that the taxi had arrived, and looking apologetic, as though he'd known that he'd startled her, though she'd not shown it.

She shrugged the thought away, and left the house and walked to the taxi. She did not know where she would ask the taxi driver to take her to, and wished that if only she could ask him to take her back a month, or two months, so that she could save her James, but time travel was the fancy of the young and afflicted, and she was neither, she could never be either.

* * *

She returned a day later with Charlie's jacket, and smiled when she thought how ridiculous he must have looked walking around in the cold without it, or trying to explain how he'd lost it or misplaced it. Or perhaps he'd just said that he'd put it in the wash?

Bella had gone out with friends when she'd arrived at Charlie and Bella's house, and Charlie was not in, so she'd hidden and waited until Bella had come home, and then her father; he'd obviously been working late, and was fortunate to be able to listen in to a conversation between Bella and her father about a school trip that would take her away from Forks for four days, and decided to leave the jacket on the veranda railing instead of knocking.

* * *

The school trip was two weeks later, and Victoria couldn't have been happier. She'd spent far too much time dallying, following Charlie day in day out, and she was tiresome with it. She was itching to make her move, to gain her in, and the day that Bella left for the school trip would be the day that she would make that move.

She'd stolen a nice pair of boots from a shoe store in one of the larger towns – it had taken far too long to decide exactly which pair she'd wanted, she thought afterward – and, after some indescribable fancy, dyed her hair red, and taken a walk to Carver's Café, where Charlie regularly ate dinner, and met him coming out, and apologised for forgetting to give him back his jacket and for not handing it back in person.

It hadn't been hard, of course, to put on a slightly depressed air, and he'd been the one apologising to her instead, telling her that he should have remembered himself, and all sorts of nonsense about not missing it for just one day, though she knew that he had because she'd followed him.

Over the four days that Bella was away, they took long walks in the forest after dinner and into the night, and then she'd have to take the taxi that Charlie had called for her, though she considered it worth it, because she'd finally started to get somewhere.

When Bella came home, Victoria had to be more careful, though she almost wanted to be carefree, she almost wanted Bella to know, and to try to stop her. It was so hard not to just turn up and knock on the door and have Bella find out that she'd made friends with her father, and that, somehow, she'd have her revenge, and that it _definitely_ involved Charlie.

But then Bella's boyfriend would know, and she'd have to deal with him and his lot, and she didn't feel ready yet to take that road. It was, after all, one against seven.

So she could not reveal herself to Bella.

* * *

It was only when Bella decided to take a camping trip with her girlfriends for a long weekend, when Victoria was given her second real opportunity, and was asked to the cinema by Charlie, and – despite herself – agreed to.

The cinema, honestly!

She even had to endure those popcorn-throwing brats that she'd have liked to have taken outside and ripped their throats out and left them in a dumpster to die, but she had, because a couple of brats had meant nothing to her compared to Bella's torment.

She knew she'd hate the cinema from the moment she had agreed, but Charlie had made it all the worse. She had no idea how he found a _children's_ movie amusing, but he did, and the popcorn-throwing brats were not impressed. She's almost wanted to shove her hand over his mouth, but she'd contented herself with her thoughts of how Charlie _would not_ be laughing when she ended his life.

They walked to the car in silence, but it seemed the night had other plans, because, a block from the car, the sky opened up and drenched them in rain. When Charlie put his arms around her, as though this would save her clothes, she felt like shoving him off her and slapping him across the face, but, as this would have ruined everything, she refrained.

Charlie put the heater on in the car for the drive back to his house.

Victoria felt sopping and miserable, just as she imagined she looked in her wet clothes, and she was _hungry_. Suddenly, she wished she'd made a meal of those brats.

For the most of the trip back to Charlie's house, she was able to control herself. Until she started staring at him, ignoring everything else, and she thought that maybe just she'd not have enough self-control not to bite into him right there, and drink him dry.

And, after all, he'd be dead, and Bella would have been able to do nothing. So, as they pulled up in front of the house, she let go of her hesitation. At last, she'd have her revenge, and then, she'd take care of Bella, grief-stricken and confused – and there would be nothing Edward would be able to do to save her.

She'd wait, of course. She'd wait for the sunlight, when Edward would not dare show himself. When Bella was finally alone and grieving for her father at his gravesite.

She lunged for Charlie, but he'd not been finished with the car, and startled, he knocked the car into gear and the car lunged forward, and would have taken out the veranda if Charlie hadn't hit the brakes, and, knocked onto him by the sudden movement of the car, was witness to the relief that washed over his eyes, the heavy sigh.

She thought she would just bite him then, and see the relief in his eyes turn to shock and terror, but, despite the increasing hunger, she suddenly felt put off, and annoyed.

Immediately, predictably, Charlie rushed to apologise – she was so sick of his apologies – and she leant forward to tell him this, to whisper it in his ear, but found the words suddenly stuck in her throat. Why was she even bothering? she wondered.

She stuck out a hand to open the car door, and felt Charlie's hand follow hers and come to rest atop her own. Don't.

She could have just walked away, she considered. It wouldn't have been any trouble, at all. She even could have knocked him out, if she'd wanted too, and then walked away. But that wouldn't have benefited her plans.

With an utter disgust she thought she'd long learnt to ignore, or had forgotten, she lowered her face and pressed her lips against his.

From that moment, she was glad that Bella was not home. She was glad that Bella was not there to see the levels to which she would stoop to gain her revenge.

At first, it was just kissing, but then they arrived in the bathroom, and it escalated to more than just kissing.

Afterward, when she was lying awake beside Charlie in bed, she considered shooting herself out of principle. It wouldn't kill her, but maybe it would hurt, maybe it would distract her from the overwhelming disgust she felt.

She woke in the morning, confused. At first, she didn't remember where she was. Then, she couldn't understand how she'd let her mind wander. Of course, she'd not really fallen asleep, because vampires didn't sleep.

In any case, she didn't stick around. She could have killed Charlie then, but she felt too sick – too confused – to eat.

* * *

She arrived at Charlie's later that day, and waited on the front step for Charlie to arrive home from work.

When he saw her, Charlie pulled the car over and hurried over to let her in. It was freezing outside. He sat her down in front of the heater, and left to make her a tea.

She emptied the tea out the window when Charlie was in the other room, and left for the bathroom. Maybe, she thought, she'd just check the medicine cabinet. She had not interest in drinking Charlie's blood, as if it would infect her, and wondered if it would be possible to overmedicate him instead. Her father's suicide would devastate Bella.

The medicine cabinet was unsatisfying. She slammed it shut, and about to turn away in disgust, found herself staring into her own reflection. Strange how the legends about mirror images were so wrong, she thought. Strange how she could look upon her face, and still see the same face, though years may have passed.

She stared into her eyes, and she felt a sudden panic well in her chest. Where her eyes usually would have turned the colour of fresh blood, they'd turned a purple colour. She did not like the colour at all. Was it because of her hunger? she wondered, and swiftly turned from the cabinet and the mirror and exited the room. It did not matter, she told herself, because tonight she would feed.

She returned to Charlie and the kitchen and they spent the night as they had the previous night, and, laying together in bed, Charlie read her a picture book from the nightstand. It had been Bella's favourite, he told her, and felt slightly nauseated. It always calmed him down, when he missed Bella too much that he started to worry that something bad must have happened to her, though he knew that there was no reason for anything to have done so.

Victoria almost took the book from him and clobbered him over the head with it. Where did he get these lines from? She imagined that he'd probably read them in a men's magazine, or some sort, and remembered that she wasn't strictly to have known of Bella's existence, and feigned surprise. He had a daughter? How old was she? Where was she? Where was her mother? Did they still have a future together?

_What are you thinking?_ she asked herself, moments later, but was pleased by Charlie answer.

* * *

She was roused from her non-thoughts, in the middle of the night, by an indescribably horrible pain in her intestines, and wondered if she was dying. What else could it be, after all?

She opened her eyes to find herself alone in the room, and then, from down the hall, she could hear Charlie on the telephone. He was telling someone on the other end of the line that he'd been unable to wake her.

She wondered why he sounded so worried, when, in reality, he didn't even know her.

She attempted to sick, fearing that he'd called the hospital, and fell off the bed and fell with a loud thud to the floor. She lay on the floor, unable to move for the pain; it had seemed that moving had only made it worse, and listened to the sound of Charlie leaving the telephone and hurrying up the hall.

After a long and painful struggle, she was able to convince Charlie that she was fine, that it had just been a bad dream, and Charlie left to ring the hospital back and explain this to whoever it had been he'd been talking to.

Charlie came in, afterward, with a big stuffed polar bear toy, and told her that he'd been saving it to give it to her later, but he'd thought that she might like it now, and she wondered, through the almost blinding pain she was not permitted to show, if he was mad.

They lay back down together, and, when he'd drifted off to sleep, she left; thought about leaving the stupid white bear, but took it anyway. Maybe she could use it to lure herself a meal.

* * *

She left town, decided to seek her meal elsewhere, and she'd just managed to lure a teenage girl with the excuse of having lost her small son – the bear, of course, was his – when she felt a strange draining sensation, and everything went black.

She woke up in what she supposed was a hospital, in one of those awful hospital beds, and could hear the teenager in the waiting room, talking with the police, telling them that she'd said that she'd lost her son, that she thought she was maybe mentally unstable, and that she'd said that the bear was her sons.

A nurse arrived later, and a doctor then, and after a painful examination – she could not believe how much she hurt, and now the pain was all over, though she did not allow the pain to show – she was presented with something to eat, and left alone again.

She wondered if she should call a nurse. She could not eat this detestable human food, but she could make do with the nurse. In the end, she was too tired to raise her voice.

She resigned to watching Mickey Mouse on the television, and passed out again. When she woke, she found she'd been attached to a drip. She almost ripped the thing out on the spot, but then she spied the bear across the room, left there by the teenager, or by a policeman or a nurse.

She slipped off the bed, the pain was surprisingly less now, and retrieved the bear and retreated to bed.

When the nurse returned, she found the bed empty and the bear gone.

* * *

Victoria tracked the teenager to a fast food restaurant, where she worked, and learned that the teenager's name was Agnes and that she was eighteen and that she'd dropped out of school.

Agnes set her up with something to eat, which Victoria thought might induce some sort of fit if she so much as touched it, but ended up eating anyway, and even though she felt sick, she didn't throw up.

Agnes asked her if the police had found her son, and Victoria had to lie and say that he was staying with his father, that sometimes she drunk a little too much and forgot, and she'd be so so grateful if she didn't tell any of this to the police if she saw them again.

Agnes agreed, and Victoria was given her handbag with the offer to fix her makeup and brush her hair.

Victoria took the bag and left the restaurant dining area and headed for the restrooms which Agnes had pointed out. She would fix her makeup, she decided, and then she'd drop by Charlie's and kill him. She didn't know what was wrong with her, but she felt particularly angry, and supposed that if she killed Charlie, she'd maybe feel a little bit better – and then she'd find that brat Bella, and kill her, and her friends, too. Painfully.

She took out the stick of eyeliner and started to fix around her eyes, and the eyeliner dropped out of her hands at the sight of her eyes in the mirror – as clear and as bright as blue ice.

She hurriedly stuffed Agnes' eyeliner back into her handbag and ran out of the restroom. She dropped the handbag on the table in front of Agnes and fled the restaurant. She was aware of Agnes following, but she was faster, and her eyes were much more sensitive in the dark than Agnes' pathetic human ones, and she finally found herself alone in the forest.

She fell down on the ground, and cried and cried. She dragged her eyes open to the feeling of sunlight burning on her skin, but the sunlight did not make her skin sparkle and glow, and she became inexplicably frightened.

What was happened to her? She picked herself up off the ground and ran, and ran. How could she still have the reflexes of a vampire, when she was not a vampire, for she was sure now what was happening to her. She was becoming human again.

She was dying.

* * *

She arrived at Charlie's house just as he was backing out of the drive, and Charlie slammed the brakes on, afraid that he would hit her.

He pushed the door open and climbed out of the car and ran around the car toward her, and she felt, when he wrapped his arms around her, that he'd been worried.

She reluctantly and wordlessly allowed him to take her to breakfast on his way to work, and sat in Carver's Café, wondering when she'd die. She already knew that she was dying, it was only horribly cruel that she did not know when it would happen.

Would she be reunited with James then? she wondered, and felt Charlie place his hand on hers, and she felt a strange warmth travel up her hand, along her arm. She wondered what was wrong with her, and gazed up to see Charlie also gazing at her.

_Heck, this is getting ridiculous!_ she scolded herself, but could not make herself look away, and wished she would die soon.

* * *

She took the bear Charlie had given her, and the pair of Charlie's sunglasses that she'd taken from his car along with the money she'd taken out of his wallet when he'd refilled the tank on the car and she'd volunteered to pay and he'd offered her his wallet, and took the bus out of Forks. She could not stay here, she thought. Not with all this madness.

She'd return when she was feeling better, if she lived that long.

* * *

_Nine__ months later_

Victoria returned to Forks, Washington, in a deep blue Alfa Romeo, Elvis Presley playing over the sound system.

She'd debated with herself, for the longest time, whether to return to Forks, to Charlie, but she was not returning to Forks or Charlie, she was returning to Charlie what was half of him. She could never be that person, she could never be a mother. She was a vampire. She would always be a vampire. That had not changed, she realised.

She was alive, now, but maybe she'd always been that way. Maybe, she'd always been alive, just asleep. Maybe that was why vampires did not sleep? Maybe she'd just woken up?

What scared her most about Didi – her Didi – was that he was not like other babies, that she'd changed him somehow, being his mother, contributing half of her genetics to him. What scared her most was the thought that maybe he was like her, that maybe he was a vampire. It was a ridiculous thought, but it was a thought she could not shake. No, he was not like other vampires, but he was a vampire nonetheless.

She thought, maybe, if she left him with his father, maybe he'd never become like her, maybe he'd stay like all of the other children, for how could he have been born a vampire, vampires were not born, and vampires did not age? Maybe, if she never saw him again, he'd be just a boy, like all of the other boys in the world, and he'd grow up to be a man, and he'd never know about the half of him that was a monster.

She could not be a mother to him, she knew, but she would never stop loving him. In a way, it was cruel. It was horribly cruel. But she would not have her son become what she'd become. She did not regret what she'd been, what she was, but she would not wish it for her child. Her life was not for everyone, she knew, just as it was not for Edward or his family.

She parker her car at the end of Charlie's street and walked with Didi to Charlie's house. The back door had been left open.

She sat down at the kitchen table with Didi to write Charlie a note of explanation, then found that she didn't know what to write.

She waited until the last minute to leave, leaving Didi asleep, and the note on the kitchen table.

_Dear Charlie,_ the note would read when Charlie picked it up, _He is yours. I have named him Didi. I know that you will love him as much as you love Bella. Keep him safe. The one thing I implore of you: Do not tell him who I was. Perhaps you might burn this letter once you have read it._

_I cannot say that we will meet again, in which case, I imagine that this is goodbye._

_Goodbye, Charlie._

* * *

_Sorry, I am so not into the whole vamp undead thing. It troubles me. I guess I don't really understand it... so yeah. But I won't get started._

_Not that that means I haven't written about vampires before, in stuff that isn't fan fiction, but then I kind of tried to make up an explanation for it, even if I never got to use that explanation in the story._

_About the story, it's lame, I know =(_

_Anyway, thanks for reading, and leave a review if you want._


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